Abstract
The demise of Rocky Mountain News and printed Seattle Post-Intelligencer only weeks apart in 2009 met with an outpouring of mediated concern among the journalistic community. In the shadow of the two failed newspapers, journalists defended the medium while warning of the growth of online news forms. In analyzing this response, this essay reappraises literature on ‘paradigm repair’ in which public repudiations of supposedly individual deviance aim to protect journalistic values and practices from scrutiny. It argues for the need to extend paradigm repair to account for an interpretive shift from individualizing and ostracizing incidents to holding them to be generalizable indicators of widespread paradigmatic challenges. Dubbed ‘second-order paradigm repair’, this concept aims to improve understanding of journalism in a time of change.
Introduction
Plagued by receding advertising revenues and consistently shrinking readership, the US newspaper industry met the economic downturn striking in the latter half of 2008 with particular concern about its future. These fears were made manifest in early 2009 when the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased newspaper operations within weeks of one another, leaving scores of journalists and other employees jobless and making Denver and Seattle one newspaper towns. An outpouring of concern throughout the journalistic community followed, voiced publicly through news stories and opinion pieces defending the newspaper medium while confronting new realities about the industry.
To make sense of the journalistic reaction to the failure of two regional US newspapers, this article analyzes mediated discourse around their final issues through the lens of ‘paradigm repair’ – a discursive strategy in which journalists publicly protect core values and practices from scrutiny by portraying threats as isolated deviancy irrelevant to the rest of the profession (Bennett et al., 1985; Reese, 1990). Yet a fundamental variation emerges in responses to the failed Rocky Mountain News and Seattle Post-Intelligencer: instead of pinpointing a specific wayward individual or organization for blame, the journalistic community aimed its repair work toward a wide-ranging defense of the paradigm and attacks against competing media forms. Although journalists continued to protect a newspaper paradigm defined by objectivity, hierarchical work structures, advertising-based funding, for-profit ownership, and a shared professional identity, they diverged from past instances of paradigm repair to confront rather than dismiss questions surrounding their continued viability.
This article asserts the need to consider ‘second-order paradigm repair’ to denote a distinct interpretive move in which journalists’ repair work departs from isolating a threatening incident as deviant to instead generalize its significance to the profession. An analysis of journalists’ reactions to the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer demonstrates how, despite their peculiar competitive contexts and lack of public reaction, the two newspapers were made to represent ongoing problems for the entire newspaper industry requiring support for the besieged paradigm.
The following sections begin with a review of paradigm repair as a form of metajournalistic discourse before turning to how journalists interpreted the closing of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s transformation into a scaled-down online news site as signifying imperiled institutional structures that required repair work to protect the existing newspaper paradigm. Although many journalists portrayed the newspaper failures as signaling both a threat to the dominant journalistic order and to society as a whole, this was not a universally held opinion. Others interpreted this moment to be an opportunity for re-evaluating news practices. The conclusion argues for treating second-order paradigm repair as analytically distinct from its forbears in order to better our understanding of journalism in a time of change.
Metajournalistic discourse
While a rich body of journalism research explores the content, production, and reception of news, far too little attention has been directed at how journalists talk about their work in public ways (Haas, 2006). As an object of inquiry, metajournalistic discourse reveals attempts by journalists to articulate, negotiate, defend, and even obscure their cultural, social, and political significance. This is not idle banter, but one means by which journalists actively seek to define the boundaries of journalistic practice, locate their profession within society, and shape how their work should be received (Dahlgren, 1992). This discourse is not univocal, uniform, or uncontested, but ongoing, persistent, and contradictory. Metajournalistic discourse arises rather frankly in the presentation of awards and honors, the condemnation of wayward stories and reporters (Eason, 1988), the memorializing of deceased members (Carlson, 2007a), anniversaries of great events (Kitch, 2002; Zelizer, 1992), retirements (Usher, 2010), confrontations with competing ways of doing things (Singer, 2003), the metacoverage of political campaigns (Esser and D’Angelo, 2006) and even within the fabric of everyday news content. In their totality, these various metajournalistic discursive sites outline ‘the boundaries of the permissible’ (Eason, 1988: 206).
Importantly, the emphasis here on the discursive and symbolic construction of journalism should not be viewed as a trade-off from attending to the material conditions of news practices. Questions surrounding media ownership structures, advertising trends, changing audience preferences, and relations with sources remain crucial components of journalism scholarship. Focusing attention on metajournalistic discourse allows us to better conceptualize how the journalistic community constructs its work and its image in relation to the changing conditions in which it operates. Not merely battered about by a changing media environment, journalists actively confront rising tensions through interpretive discourse aimed both internally within the profession and externally to non-journalists (Berkowitz, 2000). Understanding the news we have requires a critical consideration of how journalists understand themselves and define their role, a pursuit aided by the body of work on paradigm repair.
Paradigm repair
The perspective gained from paradigm repair is at once critical and cultural. While these are related aspects, they need to be clarified lest a one-sided view rob the concept of its depth. In line with other critical analyses (Bennett, 1983, 1990), the origins of paradigm repair lie in the attempt by Bennett et al. (1985) to better explain the normalization of a narrow band of news sources and topics. Drawing on Kuhn’s (1996[1962]) notion of ‘paradigm’ as a constellation of communally held beliefs and guidelines directing scientific inquiry, Bennett invokes the concept in terms of its inherent condition of exclusion: a ‘paradigm organizes the world of social values systematically in favor of certain values and groups and against others’ (1985: 67). Like scientists, journalists operate according to a paradigm defined through a normative adherence to objectivity, distance, and impartiality that, in practice, generates patterns of news privileging elite sources and a limited range of acceptable story topics. Reese (1990) takes up Bennett’s core problematic of the reproduction of elite-defined news by more thoroughly connecting reporting values and practices – the ideology of journalism – to the wider dominant ideology privileging elite interests. Just as powerful elites have an interest in restricting the range of values and opinions considered to be shared throughout society – a belief in private property, private enterprises over public bureaucracies, a restricted political spectrum – journalists too restrict their range of topics and voices to a narrow range of consensus (see also Hallin, 1986).
Paradigmatically, objectivity provides an overriding professional ethic that strengthens the hegemonic power of the system (Hackett, 1984; Schudson, 1978). As objective observers, in this view, journalists only translate the facts of an existing reality that is predetermined, and, as such, free of value. Objectivity disappears as a paradigmatic choice along with its active work of shaping and constraining how news gets made. A threat to the system – in Reese’s study a long-time Wall Street Journal reporter revealed to be a socialist and in Bennett’s study a self-immolation taped by a local television news crew – threatens to expose ideological assumptions inherent in the ostensibly non-ideological paradigm of objectivity. Anomalous incidents become dangerous revelations requiring restorative action from the community.
For both Bennett and Reese, the deployment of paradigm repair discourse matters more than the simplistic reason of reasserting journalistic authority for the sake of professional posturing. Of course, any profession seeks to establish its authority while staving off competitors (Abbott, 1988), but consequences must apply beyond this for paradigm repair to be a worthy topic. With this in mind, Bennett and Reese argue that, given journalism’s close linkages to other institutions of power, paradigm repair buttresses a set of values and practices whose outcome is a narrow band of news discourse that fails to admit but a small sliver of usually elite sources and their viewpoints. This is not to suggest a shared viewpoint, but rather a consensus of allowable viewpoints.
Viewed culturally, the rallying discourse of paradigm repair reinforces chronically unstable ties binding journalists together as an ‘interpretive community’ (Zelizer, 1993). It supplies guideposts for acceptable practices, expected norms, community boundaries, and shared ethics. In his analysis of how journalists reacted to the role of paparazzi in the death of Princess Diana, Berkowitz noted the ‘double duty’ of paradigm repair in not only reinforcing journalistic norms to the public, but also ‘outlining the boundaries of the community along the way’ (2000: 127). This involved ‘paradigm boosterism’ (2000: 133) to elevate the preferability of existing models of journalism as compared to, in the case of Princess Diana’s death, paparazzi-generated tabloid news. This same dynamic appeared in McCoy’s (2001) study of controversy surrounding an early online reporting project in the mid 1990s (see also Ruggiero, 2004). Other work has also concentrated on efforts by the journalistic community to enforce boundaries in the face of perceived violations (Bishop, 1999; Carlson, 2009; Frank, 2003; Hindman, 2003, 2005; Winch, 1997). This goes along with an uptick in journalistic commentary about its own workings (Cecil, 2002).
Paradigm repair comes down to policing the orthodox. A common journalistic ideology results not only in shared values and practices, but, crucially, an ‘imagined collective subscription’ (Berger, 2010: 226) to a framework for processing new incidents through an existing ideology in order to create the news (see Deuze, 2005). And the ability to define what is worthy of public attention and comment, who should speak about it, and which frames are acceptable, is an exercise steeped in power. As Bennett and colleagues assert in the original study of paradigm repair: ‘a powerful system of logic underlies the news and provides implicit boundaries on the parts of the world that are newsworthy and the parts that are not’ (1985: 67). Paradigm repair elucidates a crucial component of the overall process shaping prevalent forms of news. The acceptability of an elite-focused, for-profit, objectivity-based news system depends, in part, on the ability of the community to perpetuate this style as preferable – or even natural. Research on paradigm repair suggests that journalists defend their paradigm by isolating individuals or incidents that threaten to expose contradictions underlying news practices. However, journalists cannot explain away all incidents as aberrations, leading to a different strategy for confronting threats to the news paradigm. Such was the case in early 2009 when the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ceased to be newspapers.
Cases and method
Newspaper failure in the USA has been a fact of the medium since the first newspaper in the colonies, Publick Occurrences, Both Foreign and Domestick, also became the first defunct newspaper after being shut down by the government following its debut issue in 1690. Later, cut-throat competition between rival newspapers endured throughout the 19th century. In 1900, the total number of daily US newspapers stood at 2226 (Wright, 2001: 388). By 2008, the number of papers had declined by one-third to 1408 (Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009). Over the past century, several factors contributed to newspaper failure, including the switch from a partisan to objective news style, the growth of broadcast news, the decline of afternoon newspapers, and periods of economic instability. Failure was not confined to smaller newspapers; while once famously fierce competitors, Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World folded in 1931 followed by William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal in 1961. Elsewhere, the hybrid names of many newspapers indicate a legacy of mergers further reducing the total number of newspapers over time.
Although periods of turmoil were not new to the industry, in 2009 newspapers faced several indices of decline, including sagging levels of public trust (Pew Research Center, 2008) and diminishing audiences. The percentage of people who regularly read newspapers had dipped steadily, from 71 percent in 1992 to 40 percent in 2010 (Pew Research Center, 2010). Perhaps more alarming, a Pew Research Center survey conducted during the time of the two closures found that only 33 percent of respondents would miss their newspaper ‘a lot’ if it vanished while 26 percent said they would miss it ‘not at all’. For those aged between 18 and 39, the latter figure ballooned to 48 percent (Pew Research Center, 2009). Although newspapers had long remained a robust business, economic troubles were exacerbated by the recession striking the USA and other countries in 2008 and 2009. In 2009, total daily newspaper advertising revenues declined to just under $25 billion, down from $46 billion three years earlier in 2006 and the lowest level since 1984 (Newspaper Association of America, n.d.). One blog reported over 14,000 newspaper jobs disappeared in 2009 (Paper Cuts, 2009). Such figures clearly raised questions concerning the future of newspapers.
It is in this context that the organizational failures of the Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer came to be the focus of paradigm repair discourse by the journalistic community. The Rocky Mountain News (RMN), a Scripps-owned Denver-based daily newspaper with a circulation of 210,000, closed its doors on the last day of February in 2009. It was followed less than three weeks later when the Hearst-owned Seattle Post-Intelligencer (SPI), with a circulation of 116,000, printed its last newspaper on 17 March before shifting to a smaller online-only news site in a bid to survive. These were not the only newspapers to stop printing in 2009, but they were the biggest. The RMN ranked as the 35th largest newspaper by circulation in the USA while the SPI ranked 81st (BurrellesLuce, 2009). The collapse of two large US dailies in quick succession engendered a wave of mediated responses from the journalistic community interpreting these losses as marking a threat to institutional news structures that needed repair.
Given that paradigm repair occurs through mediated public discourse and involves assigning meaning to an event, a qualitative textual analysis of news texts was conducted to identify emergent interpretive patterns among members of the journalistic community. Using the Factiva database with follow-up searches using the NewsBank newspaper database, a census of materials mentioning either newspaper was first collected for the period of 15 February to 1 May 2009 (as well as later dates for magazines). Searches included a broad range of media – newspapers, magazines, the trade press, National Public Radio, and cable and network television – in order to include as many texts as could possibly be found through the databases. These parameters yielded an initial pool of 2469 articles and transcripts. After eliminating duplicates and irrelevant mentions (e.g. mentioning one of the newspapers, but not its closure), the final pool included 571 total items. A close reading of the texts followed with a focus on where stories occurred, who wrote them, what sources were used, and how speakers framed the failure of the newspapers. The sections below examine these questions, using exemplars from the texts to illustrate major thematic trends in how the newspapers came to be talked about.
Interpreting failure at the
Rocky Mountain News
and
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
Applying paradigm repair to discourse surrounding the closure of the RMN and the online shift of the SPI is made difficult in that blame could not be accorded to ostensibly deviant actions because no clear violation of normative journalistic tenets occurred. With no simple identifiable target of deviance, what exactly is being repaired here and why? In answering this question, it is important to point to two barriers journalists had to overcome in making the closure of the newspapers the object of repair work: the unique competitive context of the two newspapers and the lack of public reaction.
First, journalists often ignored contextual elements of the RMI and SPI that limited their generalizability to the wider newspaper industry. Both the RMN and SPI existed as second newspapers in their respective cities only through joint-operating agreements (JOAs) that greatly reduced overhead costs. Outside of JOAs, the overwhelming majority of cities supported only one daily newspaper, rendering Denver and Seattle aberrations. Battles over circulation and advertising worsened the situation, making two newspapers in a single city unsustainable for all but the very largest of urban areas – a fact acknowledged by the RMN editor (Temple, 2009). Although newspaper struggles were not unique to Denver and Seattle during the economic recession in 2008 and 2009, journalists nonetheless regularly overlooked the particularity of the RMN and SPI’s JOAs when connecting them to the broader decline of the newspaper paradigm.
Reactions to the two newspapers differed in a second way from past studies of paradigm repair in that expressed or anticipated discontent from the public was not the instigating force behind repair work. As one article about the RMN and SPI observed: ‘there’s not much of an outpouring of public outrage’ (Lacy, 2009). The public remained conspicuously absent in news stories responding to the newspapers. No circulation drives, street protests, or abundant displays of public support surfaced to save the two newspapers. This dearth of non-journalistic attention could be taken as an ominous sign for the medium, as well as the statement of a 37-year-old Denver citizen who told the New York Times: ‘I don’t know anyone my age who has time in the morning to read a newspaper’ (Tatum, 2009: B5). Yet a lack of public outcry over the closing of the RMN and the end of the printed SPI did not impede journalists from bringing attention to the newspapers.
In ignoring both the RMN and SPI’s idiosyncrasies and the scarcity of public concern, the journalistic community took to interpreting the failure of two large newspapers that had only recently been profitable enterprises as indicating the growing institutional unsustainability of the newspaper paradigm. The object of repair became not a single practice or problematic event seemingly deviating from acceptable paradigmatic norms, but the organizational and social health of the paradigm itself within a changing media environment. This view of the newspaper paradigm goes beyond the beliefs and practices guiding news work to include corresponding structures in which such work occurs.
The following sections demonstrate how the journalistic community defined the RMN and SPI as warning signs for the continued viability of newspapers while seeking to repair the paradigm through arguments defending its social value and attacks on developing media forms. As will be shown, newspaper journalists protecting their paradigm deviated from the strategy of ostracizing offenders found in previous paradigm repair studies to instead turn the newspapers into symbols of industry-wide strife. This interpretive shift from dismissing problematic incidents to generalizing their meaning marks the crucial difference distinguishing first- and second-order paradigm repair.
Beyond Denver and Seattle
In order for journalists to situate the RMN and SPI as indicative of repair-worthy paradigmatic threats, they had to be made to matter beyond the local consequences of their losses. This occurred, in part, by journalists defining their demise not as isolated instances of organizational failure but as connected to ongoing economic and technological transformations. The Financial Times affirmed this by calling the RMN ‘the latest casualty of the newspaper industry’s crumbling business models’ (Edgecliffe-Johnson, 2009). Meanwhile, the New York Times characterized the problem as a confluence of ‘falling advertising, tight credit and declining circulation’ (Perez-Pena, 2009: B6). Certainly, newspapers faced a challenging economic climate, but commentators looked past both the specific competitive contexts in which the RMN and SPI operated and questions concerning new practices. It was not news that became the object in question, but the business of news.
By accepting the failure of the two newspapers as indicative of the imperiled economics of newspapers rather than resulting from idiosyncratic competitive situations or individualizable paradigmatic missteps, commentators portrayed the RMN and SPI as harbingers of paradigmatic decline. As one small Texas newspaper opined: ‘every newspaper dies a little when another goes under, and we at this little daily have felt a faint shiver of mortality at the death of the Rocky’ (Denton Record-Chronicle, 2009: A6). Similarly, the Buffalo News connected the newspapers with the health of the paradigm: ‘The fundamental job of reporting news diminishes with each newspaper closing’ (Buffalo News, 2009: G4). Elsewhere, an Idaho Statesman columnist elevated the significance of the newspapers to representing a historical media shift: ‘What we are witnessing is not just the dawn of Internet journalism, but the end of an era that dates back to the earliest days of this great nation’ (English, 2009: 15). Such interpretative frames situated the two newspapers as symbols central to understanding the US newspaper industry. The RMN and SPI became ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ (Carter, 2009: F1), the visible markers of much deeper damage in need of repair.
Journalists adopting a second-order paradigm repair response moved from the specifics of the RMN and SPI to defend the newspaper paradigm generally from the threat of either its disappearance or the rise of alternative forms. An Arkansas Democrat Gazette columnist defined a newspaper as a collection of items ‘organized by someone exercising at least some minimal judgment – rather than sliced and diced and scattered over innumerable websites in no particular order. Or, on the other hand, all too carefully organized to fit some ideological agenda’ (Greenberg, 2009: 16). This summation illuminates assumptions of the newspaper paradigm, including the suggestion that newspaper journalists exist outside ideology through their professional training. It also defended a gatekeeping role for newspapers, which was echoed by a Salt Lake Tribune writer: ‘A well-written, well-edited newspaper acts as a government watchdog, drawing information together that readers need, even if they don’t always want it’ (Beebe, 2009). Such views located the value of newspapers in the purposive decisions professional journalists make in producing a coherently organized news digest. In creating an ordered, self-contained rendering of a day’s news, journalists construct what Schudson labels ‘a hierarchy of moral salience’ (1995: 21), a role felt to be needing protection in the wake of the RMN and SPI failures.
In moving even farther from the particular circumstances of the RMN and SPI, journalists argued that the need to preserve the paradigm transcended the medium. The professional journalist – trained to be an objective, distanced observer – became the ideal to protect, even if the medium and its business model faced problems. As the RMN editorialized in its final issue, ‘Organized, systematic journalism – with designated reporters and editors, as well as some professional code – lets citizens know what their elected leaders are doing’ (Rocky Mountain News, 2009: 64). This assertion twinned democratic functioning with a mode of professionalized journalism characterized as hierarchical, bureaucratic, and codified. This same sentiment was echoed by former CNN and Time head Walter Isaacson on ABC World News Tonight (27 February 2009): ‘what we need is good, trained journalists who can play the role of watchdog’. Journalists clung to professionalization as the path to fulfilling their normative social role.
Arguments for safeguarding the norms and practices of professional journalism even if newspapers disappeared also appeared in the journalism trade press. An editorial in the Columbia Journalism Review made this case explicitly:
We need professional journalism. It doesn’t have to be delivered on paper; it need not be produced by omnibus newsrooms with twelve hundred reporters and editors; and it can surely be complemented by amateur efforts. … It is not something one does in his spare time, or when inspiration strikes. It is a job. (2009: 4)
Likewise, a commentary in the trade magazine Editor & Publisher called for preserving existing news principles while reinventing content delivery: ‘The traditions of objectivity, fairness, balance and truthfulness that are the hallmarks of excellent newspapering must survive – even if it means it must survive in another form’ (Close, 2009). Through a medium-neutral perspective championing newspaper-style journalism as the preferable model for news, journalists engaging in paradigm repair moved far from the originating incident of the RMN and SPI failures. Instead, these commentators moved to separate the newspaper medium from the values of the newspaper paradigm in a move that further abstracted a defense of the paradigm from the incidents that sparked it.
By interpreting the SPI and RMN to be indicative of far-reaching problems for newspapers and not irrelevant outliers, members of the journalistic community used the occasion of their final editions to launch a public defense of a paradigm perceived to be in need of repair. One newspaper columnist expressed anxiety over the medium’s waning cultural authority through a comparison between a heralded past and a cloudy present: ‘Where once stood titans of public information now quiver worried-looking scribes hoping the next paycheck isn’t their last’ (Hecox, 2009: A4). Worry did reign, but commentators continued to focus on economic and technological factors, leaving aside questions directed toward news practices and changing public attitudes. Shunning critical attention to the news product or the practices behind it freed defenders of the newspaper paradigm to concentrate on norms supporting their authority and portending dire consequences accompanying their decline.
Online news as the other
In seeking to solidify boundaries of acceptable practice, members of a profession commonly map out their territory by indentifying what practices lie outside its borders (Gieryn, 1999). With journalism, this can be seen in past studies utilizing the paradigm repair approach (see Reese, 1990). In staving off threats, the journalistic community reacts by specifically discriminating between desirable norms and practices and undesirable variants. Returning to an earlier example, journalists responded to the role of the paparazzi in Princess Diana’s death by positioning themselves in opposition to such practices (Berkowitz, 2000). Similarly, journalists replying to a scandal involving a fabricated news photograph trumpeted their own rules preventing excessive digital alterations (Carlson, 2009). In these cases of repair work, journalists identified threatening values (e.g. paparazzi tactics, photo manipulation) emerging out of an incident in order to demonstrate their distance from such values.
Repair work in the wake of the failed RMN and SPI also included an effort to differentiate newspaper norms and practices, but with the vague target of emerging new media forms. Instead of coalescing around a common paradigmatic adversary, the journalistic community pursued a range of issues related to new media that had already become salient for the industry (Deuze, 2005; Singer, 2003). Cumulatively, online news forms became the other, negatively defined against traditional news practices. In the process of identifying stark differences for the decline of the newspaper paradigm, these critics tended to overlook variety across both newspaper and online news practices by casting off the latter as deviant. Moreover, new media practices did not directly link to the particular problems of the RMN and SPI. Nonetheless, journalists extended their laments over the two newspapers into a critique of online news generally and blogs specifically as inept replacements for the social role provided by newspapers. While not a focused assault, it is instructive to track the range of issues invoked by journalists fearing the weakening of their paradigm.
In the course of considering the last printings of the RMN and SPI, some speakers lashed out boldly against online information, including a North Dakota newspaper columnist who wrote: ‘The medium has a license to pollute the public mind’ (Omdahl, 2009: A4). Online news came to be feared for its seemingly unbridled nature compared to the bureaucratic order of newspapers. A former newspaper executive shared his trepidation: ‘The junk that’s on the Internet is really scary to me. It’s totally unedited. Some of it is factually, absolutely wrong. Some of it is malicious’ (Beebe, 2009). Such critiques explicitly and implicitly defended the gatekeeping function of newspapers by warning of the chaos that would accompany its abandonment. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Debra Saunders contrasted the discerning function of a newspaper with the lack of limits surrounding online news: ‘Newspapers are the public’s referees as to which information is credible. You can go online and read no end of fiction and smear about public figures. But when you read content in a newspaper, you consistently can rely on it’ (2009). Newspapers were lauded for not only selecting stories of importance, but also ensuring their credibility. Finally, an editorial in the Boston Globe extended gatekeeping to creating a common set of stories among audiences: ‘Unlike the Web, which is transient and diffuse, newspapers command the collective attention of a place, providing the civic glue that is so important in an increasingly atomized society’ (Boston Globe, 2009). Beyond providing news, newspapers helped establish a sense of community and place among readers. These commentators utilized the RMN and SPI not for its particularities, but as an opening to support, in a general way, preserving the newspaper paradigm by arguing for its foundational norms of accuracy, gatekeeping, and community-building.
Beyond gatekeeping, other professional journalists warned of allowing non- professionals to generate news. Even though the SPI was shifting to an online format, one of its columnists doubted its success: ‘an online-only operation will never have the journalistic discipline, accountability and professionalism of a print newspaper’ (Li, 2009). Others targeted the quality of online news. The publisher of the Palm Beach Post bristled at seemingly any role for amateur journalists: ‘Commentary and reporting from untrained journalists is dangerous. The only information on the Internet worth reading for hard news is produced by news agencies like ours’ (Taylor, 2009). Meanwhile, a columnist for the Salt Lake Tribune asserted the need for ethics training in order to accomplish significant journalistic work:
Journalists shine lights in dark places and tell us what they find. They tell the truth even when it’s dangerous to do so. It’s important to note that journalists are trained in – and bound by – ethics, unlike just about everyone else on the Internet. (Guy, 2009)
These comments hinge on a critique of online news as socially dangerous compared to the professionalism of newspapers – which is a common contrast (Carlson, 2007b; Usher, 2010).
Blogs received some of the most vehement online-directed criticism following the end of the RMN and SPI newspapers. In particular, journalists homed in on their subjective voice – even those who write opinion pieces. Journalists criticized blogs for leaving aside impartiality as a paradigmatic commitment. As a result, according to a columnist for the South Bend Tribune, ‘Blogs can provide news they want to believe, whether with left-wing or right-wing slant’ (Colwell, 2009). In addition to lacking partisan independence, a Star-Ledger columnist dismissed blogs as corrupted by public relations spin:
The idea that the internet is the province of the amateur is a myth. It is the province of professional propagandists. Read the comments on a typical blog and you will see one person after another mindlessly repeating some spin put out there by some cynical professional public-relations flack. (Mulshine, 2009: 13)
Others dismissed blogs as parasitical. A Philadelphia Inquirer editorial pointed to the labor done by professional journalists: ‘For all the jibes thrown at the mainstream media, it’s pretty much beyond dispute that the blogosphere thrives on reporting generated by major media outlets’ (2009: A14). Despite the lack of involvement of blogs in the RMN and SPI failures in any immediate way, journalists reacting to the two newspapers feared that blogs – described as partisan, tainted by PR, and parasitical – would ascend to compete against traditional news media in a way that would harm the latter’s underlying paradigm.
A distinguishing feature of second-order paradigm repair is an effort to generalize paradigmatic threat by casting individual incidents as symbolic markers. With the RMN and SPI, the imperative of protecting the existing paradigm stoked by the end of the two newspapers resulted in a dichotomization pitting newspapers against emergent online forms. Yet, unlike other paradigm repair studies, the discourse here remained unfocused in its assault against non-newspaper forms while reiterating core norms of gatekeeping and professionalism. This lack of a specific target extended the paradigmatic defense to encompass a broader struggle between competing understandings of news and media. However, by ignoring particularities, journalists tended to tout the opposition of news forms rather than their convergence, although more nuanced discussions of the state of news did arise, as discussed in the next section.
Rethinking the newspaper paradigm
The demise of the RMN and SPI initiated many defensive arguments connecting public harm to the effacement of the newspaper paradigm, but this was not a totalizing response within the journalistic community. Other journalists dispensed with paradigm repair to instead utilize the discursive space opened up by the failure of the two newspapers to argue for rethinking the newspaper paradigm. Yet, as with second-order paradigm repair, arguments in this vein retained the interpretive positioning of the RMN and SPI as symbols for the entire industry and not victims of their aberrational circumstances as joint-operating-agreement-supported newspapers. This resulted in a tendency for these commentators to reproduce the assumed dichotomy between ingrained newspaper practices and flexible new media forms without acknowledging the variety of each.
At one extreme, critics seized on the demise of the RMN and SPI as evidence that newspaper journalism had become a failed paradigm. Dismissing the economic turmoil engulfing the industry as a symptom rather than a cause, these voices attacked the practices of newspapers. For example, craigslist.org founder Craig Newmark faced accusations that his free online listings service damaged newspapers by contributing to the drop in daily newspaper classified advertising revenues from a high of $19.6 billion in 2000 to $6.2 billion in 2009 (Newspaper Association of America, n.d.). Newmark countered by blaming the actions of newspapers:
Conventional news media have forgotten they’re a community service. They’re supposed to speak truth to power and do things like fact-checking and editing, and when newspapers forget to do that they lose more trust. And that is more damaging than anything [craigslist.org] could ever do. (Lacy, 2009)
Similarly, former San Francisco Chronicle editor Phil Bronstein located the problem with journalists’ aversion to interacting with their audiences: ‘the public was seen as kind of messy and icky and not something you needed to get involved with’ (Kurtz, 2009: A4). On ABC’s World News Tonight (27 February 2009), Jeff Jarvis dismissed nostalgic visions of newspapers to turn instead to the need for innovation: ‘The point here is to find the new opportunities the internet provides and not to whine and whine about how the internet is killing the old ways.’ These critics countered the common interpretation of external economic and technological causes to instead strike at the heart of the newspaper paradigm.
Other advocates of paradigmatic rethinking adopted less extreme interpretations of the final printings of the RMN and SPI. These optimistic commentators expressed hope that ensuing upheaval in the newspaper industry would provide opportunities to reinvent journalistic practice by taking advantage of the capabilities afforded by the web – whether specifically in Denver and Seattle or broadly across the country. Editor & Publisher technology writer Steve Outing blamed newspapers for conservative business and editorial practices while expressing hope that ex-newspaper staffers ‘free from the corporate shackles and print-centric thinking of the decision-makers above them, are about to demonstrate the way toward local news in the digital age’ (2009). Outing portrayed the developing paradigm as one of distinct ‘unapologetic “personalities”, rather than faceless bylines’ and bereft of ‘the oft-found-in-newsrooms attitude of “Don’t bother me, readers, I’ve got work to do!”’ Other commentators echoed Outing in using the RMN and SPI to promote a shift in practices. In his Slate column, Jack Shafer advised the surviving online-only iteration of the SPI:
… not to replicate the old print edition, to be different, to cop an attitude, to crib liberally (especially from its surviving JOA partner, the Seattle Times), to go hyper-local, take risks, and to create premium content that can be sold to readers. (Shafer, 2009)
On NPR’s All Things Considered (20 March 2009), the CEO of the MinnPost, an online-only news site based in Minnesota, contrasted the site with the newspaper paradigm: ‘Our writers have much more freedom to be analytical. They combine news with commentary. Our site is more engaged with the readers than we used to be in the newspaper business.’ Similarly, Margaret Freivogel, editor of the online news site St. Louis Beacon, pointed to the flexibility of being online: ‘it’s so easy to try things, easy to experiment’ (Smolkin, 2009). In the wake of the final printings of the RMN and SPI, these speakers used the end of the two newspapers to advocate for a shift in the news paradigm while promoting their own outlets.
This section showed how the end of the RMN and SPI created room for purveyors of online news sites to laud their own practices. Yet such statements portrayed newspapers as inflexible and devoid of commentary despite evidence that newspapers have changed in tone over time, including better writing, a wider array of stories, and greater inclusion of analysis (Stepp, 1999). By eschewing questions of change or variety, this dichotomizing supported an open call for print news to go beyond a platform shift to a paradigmatic reshuffling aimed explicitly at crafting a different style of news than has existed previously.
Conclusion
The preceding sections detail how the journalistic community ignored the particularities of the RMN and SPI newspapers and their competitive contexts to instead treat their demises as requiring repair work for newspapers as a whole. To journalists, the two newspapers signaled less a rupture to be repaired and paved over – i.e. casting the two newspapers as having invited trouble by violating journalistic tenets – than a warning sign affecting the newspaper paradigm. Specifically, journalists portrayed the newspapers as falling victim to a growing institutional instability rendering the underlying paradigm vulnerable not just in Denver and Seattle, but throughout the USA. It became the story not of two newspapers in trouble, but of newspapers in trouble, which prompted a defensive response.
Why did journalists react with this type of repair work? An alternative tack for the journalistic community would have been to disregard the end of the RMN and the final printed SPI as irrelevant to the rest of the newspaper industry. Both newspapers existed primarily through joint-operating agreements that reduced operating costs. And by 2009, two-newspaper cities had been for many years an atypical phenomenon. More broadly, many examples of paradigmatic reflexivity could be found within the journalistic community, even if this did occur often in the discourse surrounding two newspapers. For example, although defenses of newspapers above invoked objectivity as lying at the heart of the journalistic paradigm, there have been many voices within the journalistic community – including Geneva Overholser (2004) in Nieman Reports and Brent Cunningham (2003) in the Columbia Journalism Review – suggesting the need to alter news norms and practices. On many emergent topics, the community has acknowledged competing viewpoints.
To understand the repair work that followed in the wake of the RMN and SPI failures, this article has argued to extend the domain of paradigm repair from individualized – or individualizeable – incidents to a different type of incident in which journalists connect perceived paradigmatic threats to larger trends that cannot be ameliorated through ostracism. Dubbed ‘second-order paradigm repair’, this variation retains its focus on the discursive means by which the journalistic community responds to perceived challenges in seeking to reaffirm its social power. By alleging the RMN and SPI to be symbolic of far-reaching threats to the paradigm, commentators viewed dire media economics and technological change as posing an existential threat to newspapers while warning of the social impact of diminished newspapers and presenting online news as an unworthy and dangerous other. In doing so, journalists sought to reinforce arguments for their authority based around the cultural acceptance of the existing journalistic paradigm, which included defenses of bureaucratic structures, gatekeeping functions and objectivity norms. However, by being so stalwart in defending the existing paradigm, journalists constricted the range of available lenses for examining ongoing problems. Such a move sidestepped deeper – and more uncomfortable – questions regarding shifting patterns of news consumption and changing attitudes altering the authoritative apparatus of newspapers. To the extent that this protectionism prevents larger questions about reconstructing journalism in an emerging news landscape, the journalistic community remains limited in its ability to present solutions.
Beyond the cases examined here, second-order paradigm repair provides a useful perspective for studying journalism in a time of widespread uncertainty plaguing the newspaper industry. Second-order paradigm repair differs from past paradigm repair studies in four key ways. First, instead of isolating a paradigmatic threat as deviant, journalists generalize a threat. Second, instead of reacting to public criticism, journalists instead try to engage the public to construct threat. Third, instead of a focus on a particular threat, journalists instead engage broader ideas about the state of their field. And finally, instead of seeking resolution by separating out a threat as aberrational, journalists confront an ongoing situation in which paradigmatic threat is not easily thwarted.
In the end, journalists will continue to analyze and work out their response to change through metajournalistic discourse as they seek to reconsolidate a collective identity built around shared visions of their work. If we allow that such discourse carries weight for how we come to think about the news, than renewed attention to paradigm repair is necessary.